The sadness of that reality–that other life you could have lived–whether it has existed in some form or not, is how little I could feel of it right here. We all have our little addictions, some more than most, but if you know the inexplicable pull of digital rabbit holes, then you get–in a way that the moon understands what it is to be the sun sometimes–how erratic brain chemistry can be. How it can betray our best intentions to be the best version of ourselves, to be in control, to be truly, consciously free.

Part of what I’ve been feeling lately are the recurring death yips, a pet term I’ve picked up from that psychopath who wrote about psychopaths, which could be telling, but the point is a death yip is that strange, random confrontation you sometimes get with the very harsh, inescapable sense of your own mortality, a glimpse of what death means, which ultimately overshadows what life means, if you let it.

I’m not even being deep here. When I was younger, I had this singular dream that I still remember vividly to this day, which is no big feat, really, given I remember a vast majority of the things I dream about, which tells you I don’t ever really get good enough sleep if I keep waking up in the middle of my REMs, but then again I remember clearly, and then I forget by choice, to make space. (Thanks, Sherlock.)

But this dream, that of being hunted by an axe murderer who eventually finds me in this drab gray building, and of consciously deciding, as the axe slow-mo’ed its way to my head, to not fight it, which my young brain can only interpret as suicide, thus opening an incredibly unique loophole in the Catholic tradition of where suicides go, that when I ‘woke up’ from being killed, I found myself cemented into the very line that separates heaven from hell. I didn’t know why I knew, but only that it wasn’t as bad as hell, but it sure wasn’t heaven. There was nothing, just nothing, not blackness, not darkness, no fire or harps or gnashing of teeth. Just this eternal conscious blank that stretched, in my mind, for centuries, and centuries upon centuries.

I was on the verge of going insane when I finally woke up in a weird sleeping position. And looking back I could probably explain the content of my dream with the difficulty I was bound to have breathing because of the way I was propped across my bed. But the terror of nothingness stays with me to this day.

What is out there? Why does it matter? I’ve long since settled that question in my rational mind. That nothing matters, ultimately, except the things we say matter. I do not believe in the absolute if only because a lot of the things I’ve believed in my life don’t really stack up to reason, logic, or sometimes, even to that magical quality of faith.

I know that what matters is what you do now, and the decisions you make day in and day out inevitably spell out the kind of person people will remember you to be. Me, that I’m this: I’m kind but sometimes pretentious, afraid of people but empathetic to an unbelievable degree, and I’m super reliable in all things except in being on time (not deadlines, but face to face stuff), which really cancels everything out, I admit, but that’s not the point, see.

Sometimes though, I find myself thinking of that other fork in the road, the one I could have taken (not auditing, I’ve closed that door long, long ago and have never ventured back, even to peek), and what kind of life I could have been living now if I did that, or worked a little harder, or met the people who have changed my life a little earlier on in my career. I think about love sometimes, about why the need remains despite all proof that I’m capable of winging it out here on solo, that it is in my nature, that my choice demands solitude.

But in the end I know these are just words. In a little bit I will be in the company of very good friends. We may or may not end up drinking the night away. We may or may not end up sharing our deepest dreams with each other. We may or may not ‘be there’ at all. And that’s the beauty of all this bullshit thinking by myself thinking these things matter–we can always turn it around, even in its darkest iterations, it is the most human thing to do to still be smiling in the middle of it all.

Update: We ended up staying the night til 4AM, talking. Good times, see.